Martin Rühl never imagined this fight would define the rest of his life. Not for a moment did he reckon it would become so epic in length, in scale, in consequences. He just thought his speck of a town should run its own electricity supply.
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| Wolfhagen, a somnolent town whose biggest previous claim to fame was that one of the Brothers Grimm had swtayed there. |
A modest proposal, but in the Germany of 2003 it was highly unusual. Gerhard Schröder was still chancellor and, although a social democrat, was pushing through more privatisations of public assets than any other leader in German history. This was in a Europe that had learned from Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan to stop worrying and start loving the private sector. Now here, swimming against history’s current, was one orderly, slightly anxious engineer.
Read the story by Aditya Chakrabortty on The Guardian - “How a small town reclaimed its grid and sparked a community revolution.”
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